CHAPTER VI ALONE

When he awoke it was full day and the sands beyond the tent opening lay white and blazing in the sunlight down to the blue, lazy sea.

He remembered everything at once. It would almost have seemed that his mind behind the veil of sleep had been reasoning the matter out, for he had awakened saying to himself out loud, and as if he were continuing a conversation, “Yes—and what is more, I saved his life.” He crawled from the tent and stood erect beneath the palms. The morning, warm, sweet, and sunlit, lay around him; the sapphire sky and flashing sea; snow-white gulls and snow-white sands. A hot, gentle wind was stirring the palm fronds. He collected some dry brushwood for the fire, lit it, and piled on some wood from the wreck. When it was alight, flickering a hundred red tongues at the sun and staining the blue air with smoke, Gaspard was brought to his first pause. Of what use was the fire? He was no good as a cook. Yves had been the cook; he had cooked crabs, tinned meat, and what-not, using an old tin for a billy; he was born for that sort of work and could do anything practical he turned his hand to.

Yves had always done the cooking whilst Gaspard had looked on. This fact struck Gaspard for the first time now. It was as though the dead Yves was still proclaiming his superiority. Yves had salved most of the31 stores, Yves had hunted for dead brushwood, Yves had found crabs, Yves had found the spring of water, Yves had found the boat sail, Yves had built the tent, Yves had found the ship of coral in the lagoon, Yves had found the gold. Yves had done everything since their landing, and he, Gaspard, had done nothing but smoke and dream.

Far from being a waster, he had, still, left everything to the big blond man so full of energy and resource and the joy of life; the southern laziness had held possession of him. All the same, Yves had proved himself the better man and was proving the fact now, voiceless and dead amidst the bushes as he was.

Gaspard kicked the fire to pieces and flung sand on the embers; then he breakfasted on some ship’s biscuit and some tinned meat, lit his pipe and strolled down to the sea-edge.

It was eight o’clock and the gasping warm wind came in over the morning sea, the lazy, deep blue sea, so infinite, so beautiful, so desolate.

He stood, and, shading his eyes, he swept the horizon—not a trace of sail or smoke could he see. The sky, of a burning emerald just above the sea-line, swept up into the burning blue, and from sea and sky, like the breath from a great blue mouth, came the warm wind. It felt like a woman’s hot fingers playing with his hair, like a woman’s warm arm cast round his neck.

From the southeast with the wind, now loud, now low, came the crying of the gulls. Though he had heard them since awakening, he had not noticed them till now; he turned his eyes to where they were wheeling and flying spirit-white in the blue.

It was at this moment that Loneliness seized his heart. The fact of his utter isolation had not stood before him32 full square till just now. The gulls were explaining it to him.

“You are alone!—alone!—alone! Hi!—Hi!—Hi!—you there on the sands alone!—alone!—alone!—we have nothing to do with you—we are nothing to you—alone there on the sands—all day long and night and day, and night and day, who will you speak to—what will you do? You there on the sands alone!—alone!—alone!”

He drew his sleeve across his brow to wipe away the sweat that had suddenly started tingling through his skin; then he cast his eyes again over the sailless blue of the sea and, turning, came back to the tent. When he reached it the terror left him, fell from him suddenly like a dropped cloak. He cursed himself for his stupidity and, though his pipe was not half exhausted, he tapped the tobacco out, re-filled and lit it. It was something to do. Then, to drive the thought of Yves away, he fell to imagining what sort of a ship would take him off the island, and then he stretched his hand into the tent and pulled out the belt and pouch of money. On the brass buckle of the belt, all green with verdigris, there was something scratched. He cleaned the brass with sand—it was something to do—and made out what seemed the initials “S. S.” He pondered on these for a while and then, opening the pouch, he turned the contents on to the sand.

Though he knew the number of coins, he counted them again and again—it was something to do. Then he began to spend them in fancy, the remembrance of the tragedy of yesterday always standing like a ghost behind his thoughts and trying to obtrude itself.

This occupation lasted him an hour, and he was brought back from it suddenly by a tug at his heart. It was still morning; the awful day had scarcely progressed; the33 mantle of Loneliness had fallen on him again; the gulls were still crying, calling, wheeling, rising, falling, fishing mechanically and seeming part of a tireless mechanism fretting the speechless blue of the sky.

He put the coins back in the pouch and flung belt and pouch into the tent; then he rose to his feet and made towards the bushes.

On the sand still lay a mark as though a heavy sack had been dragged along it towards the bushes.

He avoided the pointing of the sinister path and struck across the islet, crushing the brushwood under foot. He had no object other than to get away from the place where he was, to keep in motion—to be doing something. The heat lay heavy over the bay cedars, the air was shaking blanket-fashion under the fiery rays of the sun, the bushes were dense, yet in a trice it seemed to him he had reached the northern beach. The islet seemed to have led him across it to explain its smallness, and as he stepped on to the beach a new sensation caught him in its grip. The sensation of being ringed in, enclosed in a small circle from which there is no escape.

Yet there were no bars, and around him on every hand stretched infinity.

He came along the reef forming the edge of the lagoon; the tide was beginning to flood and the foretop of the ship was standing stark and dry from the water; the ship herself was clearly to be seen, in this light even more clearly than in the sunset glow. But the picture was far less beautiful.

Grey and dead she seemed, lying there in the diamond-clear emerald of the water, but the lagoon this morning was gay with fish, parrot-fish, gropers, flights of coloured arrows, sapphire, ruby and emerald-tinted ghosts.

34 The swell of the incoming tide came slobbering over the reef; shutting one’s eyes one might have fancied a giant shuddering and catching his breath and sobbing to himself.

Gaspard stood for a long time watching the moving life of the lagoon, absorbed, as a child might be before the contents of an aquarium. He had forgotten Loneliness for a moment, but she had not forgotten him. As he stood with his eyes fixed on a large fish, sapphire and mist-grey, that had developed like a spirit and was now hanging motionless with moving gills above the ship, casting a vague shadow upon the coral-crusted deck; as he stood watching it, the breeze strengthened, stirring his hair, and on the breeze a voice hailed him, far away and weary.

“Hi! Hi! Hi!—you there on the reef. Hi! Hi! Hi!—you there alone!—alone!—alone!—see how the wind takes us, wheeling, fishing, forever—alone—alone—alone.”

He turned his face to where, across the islet, far away in the blue, the gulls’ white wings were winking and beckoning to him; their voices, thinned by distance, had a desolation rendered even more desolate by the gorgeour of the burning blue sky, the triumphant sunlight, the licking of the warm weak wind.

There is no desolation so terrible as the desolation that lies in summer warmth and blue skies. Here life ought to have been superabundant, but here there was no life or moving thing save the wind and the gulls and the waves.

“God!” said the Moco. He thrust his clenched fist in his pocket and, turning from the lagoon, made his way along the rocks to the shore.

He returned to the south of the islet, not through the bushes, but along the eastern sea-edge where the reefs were like rows of teeth and the rock edges like razors. Here35 it was that most of the wreckage of the Rhone had come ashore, and here there was still wreckage enough, in all truth. Here was something to do.

In a moment he was up to his knees in water. The Rhone, when the explosion of the boilers rent her asunder, had cast wreckage enough upon the water, but even still, as she lay beneath the surface, sinking more and more completely to ruin, things were breaking loose from her and rising as bubbles rise from a submerged body, and drifting ashore with the tide. Hencoops, boxes, spars, barrels, were pounding about in the surf. Heavy spars were here, all chawn and frayed by the reefs; the coral teeth had left their marks on everything; there was nothing worth salving, yet Gaspard worked like a dock labourer, hauling upon spars, heaving at barrels, forgetting Loneliness in the exertion of manual labour.

But she was there, and her voice forever speaking, subtle, like a music interpenetrating all things from the sound of the wave to the silence of the sky, made itself heard again.

As the power of friction brings a machine to a pause, so did this voice, which was a part of the sunlight, a part of the silence, a part of the blueness of sea and sky, bring Gaspard to a stand.

He wiped his brow and looked at the heap of things he had collected. He remembered how Yves had laboured at the same job, and now, for the first time since the tragedy, as he stood looking at the heap of spars and wreckwood, a feeling of pity came to his heart for the man lying there dead amidst the bay-cedar bushes.

The outburst of grief to which he had given way on the evening before was, to speak truth, an outpouring of his southern nature; anger suddenly checked and flung36 back by Death, inverted and bursting forth furiously at the sight of the irreparable result of his anger.

But this feeling of pity for Yves came from the depths of his soul, for it was born of pity for himself.

It was fatal for this feeling to enter his heart just now, for the heart, softening towards the dead, opened the door for superstition to enter.

He thought of the tent over there beneath the palms and how pleasant it would be if, on his return, he were to find Yves sitting by the tent. Then, with a chill of horror, came the idea—how awful it would be if on his return he were to find Yves sitting by the tent! His imaginative mind played with this idea for a moment and then cast it hurriedly away. He laughed out loud to reassure himself, and the steady wash of the sea made answer and the distant gulls. Then, leaving the salvage bleaching in the burning sunlight, he came towards the southern beach.

No; there was nobody by the tent, but the wind was playing with a loose corner of the sail-cloth, flapping it about. The tent seemed beckoning to him as he came towards it across the white, blazing sands. Everything—every sound, every gesture of animate or inanimate nature, was beginning to have a deep and extraordinary significance for Gaspard. The silence, the sunlight, and the blueness had first conspired to shew him his loneliness; the gulls had insisted on it, gloated over it, explained it; but now, since over there by the wreckwood the pity for Yves and his fate had entered into his heart, the gulls, the silence, the sunlight, and the blueness were speaking a language less assured. “Are you alone? Hi! you there on the sands, what’s that beckoning to you? Hi! Hi! The wind flaps the tent? Ha! ha! Hi!”—and then silence37 for a moment, and then, weak, weary, querulous, from the circling white spirits away there in the smoky blue of midday—“Yves—Yves—Yves.”

The very poetry of Loneliness, Distance, Blueness, Regret—fatal regret.

Gaspard fastened up the flap, and the wind, as if vexed at being robbed of its plaything, shook the palm fronds, and then some of the finest of the sand on the beach gathered itself up into a little sand devil and danced away on the wind. An unseen hand seemed moving everywhere fitfully, now here, now there, touching the sand, touching the trees, touching the bay-cedar bushes. Gaspard, as he lay with his head in the shade of the tent resting after his exertion, listened to the faint patter of the palm fronds and the whisper of the sand; sometimes the sail-cloth of the tent would lift a bit to the wind.

It was only the wind, yet it moved like a living thing. Sometimes he imagined a hand lifting the tent-cloth back and a voice saying, “Hullo! what are you doing here?” He imagined Yves as the possessor of the voice, and he drove the imagination from his mind.

Never for a moment did he feel fear of the body lying away there amidst the bushes; not for the worth of the Rhone would he have gone through the bushes to look at it and see how it was faring at the hands of corruption, yet he felt no fear of it; on the contrary, it was the thing he dwelt on when he wished to allay fear. For fear, faint and indefinable, was taking hold upon him now. He had no compunction about the part he had played in the death of Yves. The thing was an accident, so he told himself; all the same, men who die suddenly and violently have a habit of haunting the place where they die.

You can run from a haunted house, but you cannot run38 from a haunted island. This dread of no escape was what formed the true basis of his fear, a thing on which to build terrible and fantastic edifices. He lit a pipe and, smoking it, he fell asleep, awakening in an hour or so refreshed and fearless. Sleep seemed to have wiped away Loneliness, superstition, and all their attendant evils. He felt hungry, and getting some tinned meat and biscuit from the store of provisions which lay close to the trees he dined after a fashion, and then lit a pipe.

It was now half-past three, the gulls had ceased crying and afternoon lay on the island like a hot, heavy hand. So still seemed everything that one might have fancied the islet wrapped in idyllic peace; but it was the peace that broods over fermentation. The air over the sands was shaking in waves and a faint hum of insect life came from the bushes. A torrid and tremendous pyramid of light stood upon nature, crushing her to silence yet unable to stifle her faint fret and murmur.

At four o’clock Gaspard was standing at the end of the little pier of coral reef just at the place where he had been standing yesterday, when Yves’ voice had called him to see the treasure. There were no fish visible in the water to-day, nothing floated there but an occasional scrap of seaweed. The clear water, bright as a diamond and green as an emerald, held the gaze with the fascination that lies in a globe of crystal. Out here at the end of the projecting spur of reef, with the sea on either side, one felt as though one were standing on the deck of a boat.

It was pleasant out here with the sea coming in gently around the rocks, leaving scarcely a trace of foam, scarcely a trace of sound; the islet was singing to the little waves, but the reef only gurgled, slobbered slightly when a higher ridge of swell lapped the more exposed portions, and39 sighed as the water sinking exposed the weeds, the clinging shells, and the coralline growths.

Gaspard, standing, looking into the green depths, mesmerized by their crystal clearness and thinking of nothing, was suddenly brought to consciousness by the feeling that someone was standing close behind him. He wheeled round. Nothing. The reef, the islet, sea and sky were destitute of life, yet distinctly he had felt as though someone were standing behind him, almost in touch with him, almost breathing upon his neck; and he felt that if he had turned more sharply he would have caught sight of the viewless one; and the reef, the islet, sea and sky, had for a moment a simpering look, as though they had succeeded in the trick of snatching the Unseen One away before he could be glimpsed.

The absurdity of this idea destroyed it almost as soon as it was born. He shook the sensation off with a little shiver and, casting his eyes over the sea-line again as if in search for a ship, he began to walk along the reef back to the shore.

He was stepping from the reef on to the sand, when upon the sand he saw something that brought his breathing to a stop. The imprint of a naked foot.

It was a foot-mark left by Yves, and there was nothing supernatural about it at all; it had been left on the previous day, and it was still sharp and clear, for a ledge of the reef had protected it from the wind and the blowing sand; but to Gaspard it was more terrible than the naked face of Death.

He walked away from the terrible thing with his hand clutching at his heart, his eyes cast from side to side, not daring to look back. He did not know where he was going, but his feet led him to the palm clump.

40 Here he sat down with his back to a tree bole. The terror was behind him and the tree seemed to fend it off. The tree was a living thing; all at once it had stepped out of the semi-inanimate world where trees dwell and flowers, and had become a living personality. In his supreme terror he could have turned and embraced it, but he was afraid for a moment to move from his position, just as a man is afraid to move who, attacked by enemies, has his back to a wall.

Such terror does not last in its entirety for more than a brief space of time. Reason came to his assistance. He remembered that Yves had been by the reef end on the day before. The foot-mark was a real thing. No ghost could have left it.

He was telling himself this when,

“Hi! Hi! Hi!”

Loud, shrill, heart-snatching came a hail right from behind him. It was the voice of Yves, and springing to his feet with a scream, Gaspard, clinging to the tree-bole, looked.

A great black man-o’-war bird with bright eyes and coral-red beak was passing over the islet and hailing it as it passed.

Tremendous, definite, and strong against the blue, yet more soundless in flight than an arrow, it passed overhead without a motion of the wings.

As it passed it hailed the island once again, and once again from far out at sea, motionless, but fast dwindling till it became a faint speck and was lost in the blue to southward.

Gaspard, breathing freely again, watched the great bird losing itself in nothingness, lifting veil after veil of sky,41 and horizon after horizon of sea, bound for some port of call in the Windwards or beyond.

The shock had been better than medicine to him, shewing him his own superstition and the stupidity of his alarm. The island seemed suddenly freed from the haunting presence; he began to doubt himself. If a bird could make a fool of him like that, he must be a fool indeed.

A year seemed to have passed since sunrise and the sun was now dropping to the sea, bringing to its end that vast blue day so filled with loneliness and the terrors of the unknown.